Well we all know the devil wears red.
In fact, he wears polyester with a Greenwich University logo and a badge of a hand gripping a sword.
And he makes me an offer.
“Would you give me your soul for Palace to have seven years in a row in the Premier League?”
“I am not sure you have got the right person”
“Well Parish is pretty busy these days and I am bone idle so I settled on you”
“Why seven years?”
“Because that is how long Charlton stayed up last time they were up there?”
“So you are offering me the chance to be as good as Charlton were?”
“Yes”
“Are you a Charlton fan then?”
“After what has happened to them in the last eight years? You must be joking.”
“Good point”
“I used to have a soft spot for them. I liked Derek Hales’ beard. But they disappointed me when they fired Steve Gritt so I cursed them and left them with Alan Curbishley as manager”
“We have had a pretty good start to the season, and we have a decent squad. I reckon we might last a bit longer than seven years.”
“That is what Charlton thought when they had Matt Holland, Scott Parker and those guys …”
“But they kept Curbishley as manager”
Charlton.
A team we welcome to Selhurst Park this week for the third round of the Milk/Rumbelows/Coca-Carling Cup.
Do we welcome them as our bitterest local rivals? Or are they ‘Clowns‘ from the netherworld near the Thames Barrier fighting for the glory of ‘owning‘ South-East London?
To my mind, it is a no on all counts.
When it comes to rivals I am a committed Brighton man. My formative years as a fan were the Venables/Mullery years when both teams were rising fast.
Charlton seemed to be treading water, bouncing between the second and third divisions. They had this strange ground with an enormous terrace along the side of the pitch instead of behind the goal. And they always had Colin Powell on the right wing and Keith Peacock in midfield.
In my memory, the sign that we were going places and Charlton were lagging behind came with the arrival of Kenny Sansom. He was supposed to be a left back, but played as a winger. Colin Powell had been a decent player for years, but he had never had to mark the opposition left-back. In my mind he never recovered, and ended up as the Groundsman at The Valley.
Charlton were not a bad side in the old Division Two. As well as Peacock and Powell, they had Neil Shipperley’s dad, Dave, a centre half in the Micky Droy mould, and a wily old school goal hanger called Derek Hales. Hales was not a player who worried about his body fat percentage or diet. He was good enough to get goals and get a living. He found notoriety briefly when he got into a fight with his own team mate, and future Palace signing Mike Flanagan, at the height of a promotion campaign in 1978.
As Palace (and Brighton) moved onwards and upwards and kept the rivalry strong in the late seventies, Charlton fell behind. Flanagan came to Palace and disappointed, Hales took his beard to Derby. Powell and Peacock plodded on, as far as I knew.
I can tell you two things about Charlton in the eighties. They signed Allan Simonsen from Barcelona and they had to share our ground. The latter probably causing a generation of Charlton fans, perhaps understandably, to hate us.
Back in 1977, we knew very little about European football. We got to see the English Champions play and they only played other league winner – Young Boys of Berne, Lokomitiv Leipzig or Real Madrid. Never two teams from the same country, unless you had the holders of the trophy. So, when Liverpool played Borussia Monchengladbach in the 1977 European Cup Final, we knew very little about the German side.
By the end of the game, we knew Liverpool were good, but the Danish guy Simsonsen playing for the Germans was not half bad either.
So how on God’s earth did Simonsen end up five years later playing in the English second tier? To cut a long story short and summarise it conveniently, Charlton in 1982 preceded the Palace Goldberg era by about fifteen years. They had an owner, Mark Hulyer who made an amazing high profile signing – Simonsen from Barcelona. Then made an almighty horlicks of everything else and the club were almost relegated and bankrupted, which forced them to begin ground sharing
And yet.
And yet Charlton turned things around in the most impressive way. A group of local businessmen, including former player Derek Upton, took over and turned the club around. They moved back to the Valley in December 1992, and steadily built a strong side that gained promotion to the Premier League in 1997/98 after an epic Play Off Final against Sunderland and established themselves for the seven year stretch after another promotion in 2000.
A great seven year run considering their near demise in the mid eighties.
Something we would sell our souls to match?
